Sublime Text

Again, already talked about my favorite Text Editors, but wanted to reiterate how awesome this text editor is. What really pushed it over the hump is when I found Package Control. So when someone creates something awesome, like Jinja2 Syntax Highlighting (here), Package Control has a repository where you can instantly install these great tools/plugins and run them. I want to get you looking at this again.

Git

Like I said, I've been playing with DVCS...in fact I've only been messing with version control systems for a few months...and have found Git and Mercurial (Hg) to be the best tools I can use. I use these to not only handle the changes to this blog, but also basic everyday scripts, from MATLAB to Python to Batch scripts. Having a repository that I can get all these tools is great. I really like the ease of use and Python integration of Hg, but Git has proven to be more informative and a more flexible in usage.

There are some great tools to help you get used to the Git system. I've been liking SmartGit but TortoiseGit has a much more familiar interface for many Windows users. MsysGit or Git for Windows has some good--albeit homely--tools as well.

TeraCopy

I never realized how inefficient Window's standard copy is. When transferring large files, especially across a network, I've found Teracopy can save a nontrivial amount of time. 600MB to 1GB files can transfer up to 1 minute with Teracopy in some of my initial runs. But also Teracopy handles resuming with no problems in case you have a network error.

TeamViewer

TeamViewer has been a favorite of mine for a long time. Although VNC and Windows Remote Desktop work well, you've got to jump through some heavy hoops just to connect from an external network. TeamViewer just works. It might not be as fast as these other options, but again it does work smoothly.